Scooter Braun on Beliebers, finding superstars, and making mistakes
He’s an entrepreneur, music manager, investor, philanthropist, and entertainment executive. You might even say he’s the original Belieber. Scooter Braun is behind some of the biggest pop stars in the world. And with the acquisition of Taylor Swift’s catalogue through the Big Machine Label Group, he’s shaking things up.
This week, we’re looking back at our interview with Scooter. Here’s what we learned:
1. To Scooter, making mistakes isn’t shameful.
If you’re working with Scooter Braun, you might hear him say this: failure is just a pit stop on the way to success. “You might be running a marathon and a leg get cramped and you gotta slow down for a minute, you didn’t fail,” Scooter said. “You can keep running, you just gotta slow down and let your muscles relax for a second. I think that’s failure, it’s really just a pit stop so you can rest, learn, take in the lessons that you’ve gotten from that moment, and continue on your journey.”
Scooter has faced many challenges, but reflects on his mistakes with a positive outlook. He thinks that people don’t perceive his many failures as such because he didn’t see them as failures. “If I gave up, then that failure in that moment would have been cemented as a failure,” Scooter said. “Because I chose to continue and treat it as a pit stop, people just see it as part of my journey.” Each day, Scooter wakes up and starts again, regardless of what mistakes he has made.
2. You don’t find superstars. They find you.
Justin Bieber, Kanye West, and Ariana Grande. It seems like Scooter has some sort of gravitational pull that brings these superstars into his orbit. But Scooter has a different perspective on talent and brand building. “I always compare the superstars to like finding love,” Scooter said. “You can look as hard as you want and you might not find it, and then one day it finds you.” He recalled a gut feeling when stumbling upon the work of Justin Bieber.
Though he wanted to work with Ariana Grande from the start, he hesitated but won in the end. “I thought she had a manager,” Scooter said. “So I stayed away ’cause I don’t poach, and then six months later I found out she’d been trying to get to me, and that was that.”
And Kanye? After suggesting that they should work together, Kanye just ran with it. “One day I get a phone call from Adidas and they’re in negotiations with him, and I get a phone call from Def Jam and they said, ‘Hey, we’re told not to talk to anyone but you, you’re his manager,’” Scooter said. “I said, ‘I’m not his manager, we just talked yesterday.’ I called Kanye and said, ‘What’s going on?’ He goes, ‘I don’t have time to wait, you’re my manager.’ We’ve gone on an amazing run, he’s become one of my closest friends. “
3. Justin Bieber’s growth was about reaching the fans, not just the famous.
As the story goes, Justin Bieber’s meteoric rise to fame was directly linked to his participation in online communities. With platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram, anything can happen for an up-and-coming artist. “Would Chance the Rapper be Chance the Rapper if he didn’t do it his way? Scooter said. “I don’t think so. If Justin Bieber would have never gotten signed if it wasn’t for YouTube. I think technology is allowing artists to go direct to the consumer in a way we’ve never seen before…”
For Justin in particular, audience engagement was about using social platforms differently. “When I first went on Twitter, all these celebrities were on the suggested user list and they were the only people over a million followers,” Scooter said. “They all just talked to people they knew and everyone else was very voyeuristic and just watched them.” Instead of rubbing elbows with fellow celebs, Scooter advised Justin to interact with fans. This led @JustinBieber to become the first person not on the suggested user list to cross one million followers. “Justin was the fastest growing person on Twitter, to the point where they had to dedicate 10% of their servers just to his traffic,” Scooter said.
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To listen to our interview with Scooter Braun, check out this special episode of KindredCast, embedded below, and available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
